Investigating Anger: The Architecture Of A Hot Emotion

Part talk, part practice: an honest investigation of anger. It opens with a grounded discussion of what anger actually is, the architecture of the emotional state, what it protects, what it costs, and then moves into guided work with your own experience of it. Nothing here shames the emotion; the aim is to know it well enough that it stops driving. Fourteen minutes for anyone doing real interior work.

Transcript

Hello Travellers Well, As part of my intention for Living Solo, I am interested in diving into topics that are all about communing with the Self. And creating our internal worlds in a way where we can live our best and fullest selves. And therefore, We can then be of the world and support the world around us as best we can. And as part of that conversation, I think it's important to lightly touch upon some really powerful topics around our internal states. And that may mean diving into a little bit of psychology, Just diving into the architecture of different emotional states or different situations. I, I feel that diving into this stuff a little bit is important. And, And I do want to caveat by saying that for me, I'm an intuitive, I'm an energy worker and an intuitive, And you know, I'm here to create audios that help to address this stuff, But I'm not necessarily professional and I'm not your therapist. I don't play one on TV and I would recommend definitely exploring your own resources to explore this stuff. Further if you need to. But if the conversation that I bring up here sparks a certain amount of inquiry for you, Then I feel that I will have done my job. So today, This topic that I wanted to talk about in this ramble is the topic of anger. Anger is an emotion that has had a pretty important role in my life and I feel like if I want to share a little bit about it just to give a little bit of background for this. We'll begin with that. Anger for me has you know in my family growing up been an emotion that was not an appropriate one to to bring out. You know, My family was very against any passionate, Emotional, Angry expressiveness. You know, It was extremely frowned upon and created immediate separation and isolation if anger was expressed. You know, My parents would say, You know, Go to your room and don't come out until you're You know? In a better place and of course you know as a child that's just or you know they would tell me to go outside and as a child being told that that your anger is not worth their time or attention that that creates a certain kind of message right And so, You know, As I grew up, I kept. . . Internalizing and suppressing my anger in ways where it would come out sort of sideways, You know it was energy that was that was building in my body and it would come out sideways in ways that That would be passive-aggressive and and create problems in my relationships And I didn't really know at the time, You know I didn't really know what was going on until I really got to the root of it in working with you know, My support team around plant medicine and therapy and somatic work and that sort of thing. But really, The topic around anger that I want to highlight. Today is about the difference between righteous anger and anger that arises from trauma. Now righteous anger is a healthy emotion. It's important to, I don't think I can understate that. Righteous anger is something that we have a right to feel. It's one of the core emotions. It's something that arises when we have a boundary that's crossed or if there's a misaligned expectation of some kind. And feeling that anger, Letting it go through, And having it reset and sort of reassure ourselves of who we are and what we stand for, That is something that is really important to honor. But there is sort of a, A thing that happens with righteous anger that it can also very quickly and easily tap into the vulnerable parts of ourselves that are, That struggle with an internalized narrative. And that's when we move into traumatic anger. Now, The internalized narrative is something that is subconscious. It's something that may sort of come in when something happens that we don't like. But the internalized narrative is usually something along the lines of, I'm not enough, Or I'm too much, Or I'm a bad person, Or I'm not smart. Not beautiful or something along those lines that basically just says, You know, It's this sort of trauma-based response that we hold inside us. And when we go into that place, When anger starts tapping into that part of us, That's when things can start to go a little bit off the rails. Because at that point, When we move into the traumatic anger, Then it becomes more about controlling the environment around us to then make ourselves feel safe around our own internal narrative. And the misalignment around that that can happen is that whoever is around us that we might feel angry at, They might not have a direct connection to that internal narrative that we have. They might have their own narrative or their own stories that are occurring. It's very difficult for them to then hold us in that place because they don't connect to that internal narrative in the same way we do. And oftentimes we can fall into the trap of believing that they should know. They should know how we feel inside, Right? So what do we do when that happens? Well. . . The thing that has been really effective for me that I generally encourage anyone to do is to really dive into internal child work. And there are multiple modalities and angles from which you can approach child work. You can do it in plant medicine. You can do it through somatic therapy. There are multiple different modalities of therapy that are really excellent for this. HAKOMI, Core Energetics, Internal Family Systems or IFS. And even breath work, You know, Can bring this up. But that really is the core of how do we move our anger back into a realm of righteousness and truth and sort of aligning with the reality of what is occurring. Because, You know, If somebody accidentally knocks over your glass of water on the table and we internally say, Oh my gosh, They don't see me. Care about me they obviously are you know are disrespecting me in some way then all of a sudden our anger can balloon into this level of being that completely misaligns with the reality of you know what somebody just knocked over your water it's okay it's you know maybe they made a mistake and and you know we were you know the emotions were feeling are not aligned with that So really that is the key of what I wanted to share about in this ramble, Which is just knowing the difference between. Internally for ourselves, The difference between when we get hit by righteous anger, Which is truthful and important and valuable versus then switching that anger into a place of trauma. That then causes damage, That sort of causes more damage on top of what has already occurred. And when we move into traumatic anger, That's where relationships can suffer a lot. And it takes a certain amount of self-awareness to be able to understand how to tell the difference between those things. Misaligned expectations are, If we're feeling anger over misaligned expectations or miscommunication, Then yeah, The anger is an important indication of something there that either was missed or not discussed. Allowing there to be space for realigning around what happened is really important. But it's our job, It is each of our jobs individually to have care for those inner children that we have to love them, To hold them, To be the adult for them that they need us to be. And it is not the job of our partner, Of our close loved ones, To be the adult for our children. I would like to emphasize that because if we are really placing our partners into the role of being the adult for our inner children, Then more often than not, It's going to end poorly for one or both of us. So, As I said, This can be a much deeper and more complex conversation, But this is the essence of what I wanted to share. And I feel like there's probably an audio in here that may be powerful to help honor the vulnerable parts of us that trigger into anger versus really knowing with that inner intuitive voice that no, There really is something that is a problem here that needs to be addressed. So would love your thoughts if this is something that speaks potently for you. And of course, I may do follow-ups if there are interesting topics that are opened up here. But yeah, Anyway, I hope sharing about this is helpful for you. There are a couple of books that I do know are helpful in exploring topics of working with our inner children. One of them is called You're the One You've Been Waiting For by Richard Schwartz, Who is, This book is based on the Internal Family Systems framework. And then there's another one that is sort of billed as a, You know, It's a book for parents, But I actually think it's an incredibly powerful book even for parent people who are not parents. And it's called Parenting from the Inside Out. And that book is by Daniel J. Siegel and Mary Hartzell. So anyway, Please, If there are any, If there's anything interesting that comes up for you, Please feel free to comment. There's lots of really good and juicy stuff that is all about the world of anger and how we move it through our systems and how we honor those vulnerable parts of ourselves. But really the most important piece to this and the reason why I'm doing this, As I said, Is that It's all about honoring our internal world and giving voice to the parts of us that we suppress in a healthy way such that we are not negatively impacting and sort of limiting our experience of the world externally. Alright, Well I hope that helps. And I love you and I'll be talking to you soon.